Briggs

Muggings, Nuclear Devices, Probability & Decision

Somehow I ended up on the curious site LessWrong.com, directed by somebody with the nickname Yud (from Eliezer Yudkowsky). Odd isn't in it. Investigating it led me to Reddit and…

Culture

Eastern Michigan To Install Zampolit In Every Classroom To Maintain Ideological Purity

Maintaining ideological purity requires constant vigilance. The Commissars in the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics knew this well. This is why they assigned zampolit, or political officers, to serve…

Statistics

Don’t Use Statistical Models (When You Don’t Have To. Which Is Nearly Always)

Today, a convincing argument proving the current practice of probability and statistics is mostly wrong, or wrong-headed. The picture above does---and does not---show herbicide use in several countries by year…

Culture Statistics

Science Asks: Why Are Angry Atheists Annoying?

What's more annoying than an atheist who harangues passersby about "rationality"? Easy answer: a scientist who announces a discovery about human behavior that was known by everybody since Adam. Our…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: More On The Possible Intellect

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. We're still…

Philosophy

Vatican Analyzes The Difference Between Humans And Robots

Soon a robot will ask you if you want fries with that. Computer screens already do, in some locales. How does that make you feel? Hungry? That could be taken…

Statistics

Scientific People Understand Reality Less, New Research Didn’t Study

Headline: Religious people understand the world less, study suggests, which derives from the peer-reviewed paper "Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?" in Applied Cognitive Psychology…

Culture

Seventy-Five Years After Pearl Harbor

Holy moly. Shinzo Abe is going to visit Pearl Harbor "on Dec. 26-27 to pray for the dead". Who saw that coming? According to the linked report: "We must never…

Brian (bulaoren) on Bad Black Health Blamed On SlaveryAugust 22, 2026
Enough time has passed, since this post went up, for me to feel no need to stick to the topic.…
David on Bad Black Health Blamed On SlaveryAugust 20, 2026
I would also like to point out that slaves often had *better* medical care than their working-class white counterparts, being…
Cary Cotterman on Bad Black Health Blamed On SlaveryAugust 20, 2026
Perhaps slave traders found low-intelligence blacks easier to capture, resulting in an intellectually challenged population of blacks in the U.S.…
Brian (bulaoren) on Bad Black Health Blamed On SlaveryAugust 20, 2026
Where do homicide rates fit in?
McChuck on Is Moral Certainty Possible?August 20, 2026
I am morally certain that murdering innocent children for fun and profit is evil. There. That was easy.